10.28.07
Can I buy a vowel please?
All Scrabble and Wheel of Fortune fans know the value of a vowel. Now it seems like all the e-businesses have snapped up the “e”’s. We know Apple has used a lot of “i’s and someone somewhere is hoarding the “o”s too.
How else do you explain popular new names like Flickr, Razr, Rokr, Rizr, Loopt (pronounced looped)? Of course, we don’t need those vowels - they were silent anyway. Everyone still knows how to pronounce these names… and so the English language continues to evolve. 
But speaking of letters not needed, so often I type in Flikr instead of Flickr or Flicker. Perhaps there is too much flickering going on for the Yahooligans… you’d think they would make these other spellings (for Germanic people and those who know good English respectively) point as well to Flickr! Heck, Yahoo is now a top level domain registrar.. does someone have to explain forwarding to them?
PS Motorola probably got tired of paying the original Razor for the name rights. We note with interest that the proper names are now Motorazr, Motorokr, Motorizr, etc.
